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New "NV30" Nouveau Driver Still Causes Pain

04-22-2012, 06:20 AM

Phoronix: New "NV30" Nouveau Driver Still Causes Pain

One week ago following the committing of the major libdrm re-write for the Nouveau project, the "NVFX" Gallium3D driver was dropped and succeeded by a new "NV30" driver for the GeForce FX/6/7 series GPUs. Unfortunately, for at least some hardware, this Nouveau support is still a busted mess...

It's no surprise that newer cards work better with gallium, after all there's only one person who perpetually and exclusively (as far as it comes to nouveau) works on (the 3D part of) nouveau gallium. And since I don't have the time to provide good coverage of all hardware generations, I focus on the ones I use, i.e. nv50 and Fermi/Kepler.

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I also have a FX 5200 (AGP) and 6600 GT (both AGP and PCIe).
All those cards have never had problems at all with modesetting or Compiz, Cinnamon and other accelerated desktops. It surprises me again that Michael has so much problems with Nouveau.

About incorrect rendering, that also happens at times on my FX 5200 but nvfx was worse.

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I don't get the intention behin bashing the open drivers again and again.
One could argue this could help to shift focus to open-source development and attrackt more developers - which as far as I can see hasn't happend.
Instead, what you do is to cause frustration for those few guys/girls that spend their free time writing those drivers, telling them over and over again how slow and feature-incomplete their driver is, compared to those binary blobs written by comapnies which invested millions and millions of dollars, because their whole buissness depends on these drivers.

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I don't get the intention behin bashing the open drivers again and again.

You demotivate the current developers who obviously are incompetent because of the slow progress, they quit, and the hordes of good developers just waiting for a chance to show off their work get the final incentive to start working on making perfect open source drivers with OpenGL 4 support finished before the year is over.

Comment

I don't get the intention behin bashing the open drivers again and again.
One could argue this could help to shift focus to open-source development and attrackt more developers - which as far as I can see hasn't happend.
Instead, what you do is to cause frustration for those few guys/girls that spend their free time writing those drivers, telling them over and over again how slow and feature-incomplete their driver is, compared to those binary blobs written by comapnies which invested millions and millions of dollars, because their whole buissness depends on these drivers.

Among many reasons:

- It's my form of bug reporting.

- To inform such hardware owners thinking about X hardware that it may not work or perhaps that it's in great shape, depending upon the article...

- If it's a busted mess, as a reference to cite when someone says, e.g. "Why haven't you run NV30 benchmarks yet?"

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There is a public bug-tracker, where you can post useful bug-reports without causing demotivation and irritation.

- To inform such hardware owners thinking about X hardware that it may not work or perhaps that it's in great shape, depending upon the article...
- If it's a busted mess, as a reference to cite when someone says, e.g. "Why haven't you run NV30 benchmarks yet?"

So, what about a hardware-compatibility page/wiki, instead of some random articles without any in-depth information?
This would provide some real value to people interested in switching their graphic drivers.

For an phoronix-outsider (like me) it seems phoronix is trying in cases like this to generate news when there is none to catch the eye of visitors, in the hope to generate ad-revenue.